


A Second Dose

by damnslippyplanet



Series: Something Else [2]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Divergence For The Purposes Of Introducing More Femslash, Copious Amounts of Sass, F/F, Girl Drinks, Questionable Journalistic Ethics, Season/Series 01, Team Sassy Science Goes Drinking Together Fight Me
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-18
Updated: 2016-09-18
Packaged: 2018-08-15 18:54:58
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8068846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/damnslippyplanet/pseuds/damnslippyplanet
Summary: Bev licks the taste of spun sugar and battery acid and terrible ideas off her lips and she moves through the crowd.  It parts for her easily; she cuts through it like a dance.  And she knows without turning her head to check that there are no longer red curls visible over at the bar.  She's certain in her bones that when she rounds the corner toward the bar’s bathrooms, she’ll find Freddie there, lounging against one wall, small and fierce and in every way a very bad idea.





	

**Author's Note:**

> While this is a follow-up to my Bev/Freddie story [Something Else](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7147142), it's not strictly necessary to read it first, this should stand alone. Although you have to read it if you want to know why Bev's cat is named Rosie.

By the third round of drinks, they’ve  _ almost _ managed to shake off the worst of the weirdness of having spent the afternoon dusting Jack Crawford’s bedroom for fingerprints. Zeller’s just about run through every possible variation of mocking the creepy jungle-print wallpaper, Price has lamented the lack of a fourth set of prints that might have let him create an entire theory about a secret lover making the mysterious phone calls to Jack’s cell phone. 

And Bev?  Bev is just trying to forget that she now knows which side of the bed her boss sleeps on, because for some reason that feels like a detail no one needs to know about their boss.

She’s about halfway to forgetting as planned when she first spots a tangle of appallingly red curls near the entrance to the bar. She’d know that particular shade of red anywhere. She last saw it four days ago, vaguely glimpsed on the other side of the crime tape at a Ripper scene. Before that, she last saw strands of that particular shade two weeks ago, strewn across her pillowcase, the sofa, and the bathroom countertop. She’d kept finding them for days. Freddie Lounds sheds like a cat.

Bev averts her eyes and turns back to her companions just in time to hear Zee declare: “I’m just saying, even if there  _ had  _ been extra prints, would  _ you _ fuck around on Bella Crawford? She’s some kind of Amazon. She’d kick Jack’s ass if he tried it.”

She launches back into the flow of conversation with, “I wouldn’t want to bet against Jack, no matter who was trying to kick his ass,” and they’re off and running again.

Final determination: Bella and Jack are perfectly matched, and even if they weren’t, they’d never cheat on each other because they’re both too terrifying. Also because no one else would ever have sex in that room with that wallpaper. Price’s theory is down the drain, and they’re back to the mystery of What’s the Deal With Miriam Lass?

Or they are until the drinks arrive.

The shot glasses hit the tabletop with a clink and a note from the waitress that they’ve been sent by someone at the bar. They’re so pink.  _ So,  _ so pink. Bev thinks vaguely that they look like magic potions. Some kind of Harry Potter bullshit. Love potions, probably, and she bites the inside of her own cheek to keep from laughing at that.

Zee’s staring in horror, but Price is positively gleeful. No surprise: If you could distill Jimmy into a shot glass, it might look something like this, except with more weird trivia involved. 

“This might be the best day of my life,” Price declares. “I have seen Bella Crawford’s shoe collection, and now we have a secret admirer and free pink booze. I could die a happy man right now.”

He bullies Bev and Zee into clinking glasses, and then Price downs his. Zee just raises his to eye level and studies its violently pink depths with an expression that suggests he thinks it might be poison. Bev goes ahead and tosses hers back. She already knows what it’s going to taste like, just like she knows who sent it over. It makes her mouth taste something like cotton candy might if it were sour-sweet and 100-proof and possibly also on fire. 

Zee stares at the two of them with that expression he gets, the  _ how did I end up the grown-up of this trio? _ look. “I’m not doing your autopsies if you both drop dead from poisoned mystery shots,” he says.

“They wouldn’t poison us here. They love us. We’re reliable business and pretty as hell,” Price bats back.

“You remember there’s a serial killer running around targeting people we work with, right?”  Zee has apparently decided to be no fun at all tonight.

“There’s  _ always _ a serial killer running around,” Bev reminds him. “It’s why we have jobs. I don’t think the Chesapeake Ripper is into girl drinks, though. Drink your damn shot, Zee. Or give it to one of us.”

Price snatches the shot out of Zee’s hand before Bev can, and holds it up to the light to study its alarmingly rosy depths and launch into a disquisition on how red dye for food is made. He barely gets the words “cochineal extract” out of his mouth when Bev announces, “Gross. I’m leaving until you’re done talking about squished bugs. I’ll be back, and one of you better drink that thing before I get back, or I’m going to have to, and I don’t know if I can survive a second dose.”

Which is exactly why she shouldn’t be getting up from the table, but Beverly doesn’t believe in second-guessing. You collect your data, you do your analysis, you make your decision, and you act on it. Second guessing gets you killed. Second guessing lets guilty people go free. You make your decision and you get moving.

So she licks the taste of spun sugar and battery acid and terrible ideas off her lips and she moves through the crowd. It parts for her easily; she cuts through it like a dance. And she knows without turning her head to check that there are no longer red curls visible over at the bar. She’s certain in her bones that when she rounds the corner toward the bar’s bathrooms, she’ll find Freddie there, lounging against one wall, small and fierce and in every way a very bad idea.

The scene’s exactly what she expected, but she hadn’t predicted the way a single tiny butterfly flutters and jumps in her stomach at the sight of Freddie. That’s not good. That’s a problem, because there’s  _ bad ideas that are kind of brilliant _ and  _ bad ideas that are really truly terrible ideas _ and being  _ happy _ to see Freddie Lounds would be the second kind of bad idea.

The best defense against terrible ideas is a good offense. Bev drapes herself against the opposite side of the hallway and lets herself drawl a bit when she says, “Lounds. You don’t call, you don’t write…”

Freddie’s smile is all teeth. Beverly remembers their small, sharp imprint on her shoulder and the butterfly flaps its wings again, somewhere inside her.

“I write constantly, Katz. There’s a whole website. You might have heard of it.”

“I think Jack had the IT department block it a while back, actually. Don’t know exactly why, but I think the words “noxious lies” were involved.”

It’s a lie and they both know it; Jack may hate Tattle Crime but he gets the daily digest in his email. Better to know what Freddie’s up to than not to know, and be blindsided by another one of her stories about one of their cases.

Freddie tilts her head to the side, baring an expanse of pale skin. She says, “I sometimes get the impression Jack Crawford isn’t very much fun.”

“No comment.”

They stare each other down across the dingy hallway, with the weight of all the reasons they can’t have a simple conversation hanging in the air between them. Bev considers going back to the table and falling back into a discussion of beetle-wing food dye with the guys. It would be a lot simpler and less likely to blow up in her face. But before she can, Freddie offers a little shrug and holds out her hand.

“We are officially off the record for the remainder of this conversation. Deal?”

Bev thinks:  _ There’s no such thing as off the record with you _ . The butterfly in her stomach thinks:  _ I probably ought to get your shirt off and check that you’re not wearing a wire.  _ The vile pink drink hitting her bloodstream helpfully adds:  _ Possibly I should check with my tongue. Just to be thorough _ .

She makes a decision, and refuses to second-guess it.

“Maybe we should say the remainder of the night. Just so we don’t have to get into any arguments about the precise definition of  _ this conversation _ . Okay?”

“Deal.”  Freddie’s hand is warm, her handshake oddly formal given where her hands were on Bev’s body the last time they spoke.

Once the deal is done, Bev relaxes into a grin and leans in close to confide, “Off the record?  Jack Crawford’s smart and scary and brilliant at what he does, and he’s pretty much no fun at all.”

“I had a feeling.”

“The rest of the team’s fun. I’d invite you back to the table but…”

Freddie shrugs. “Price might get a kick out of it, but I don’t think the rest of us would have much fun. Plus I’m hungry and I think even the salads here are deep-fried. Do you need to get back?”

“I should go back for a minute. See if Zee’s braved his shot yet, say goodnight. But then I could go for something to eat.”

Bev hadn’t been entirely sure Freddie was nervous, but she can see it now in the way the line of her shoulders relaxes fractionally. It calms Bev a little; at least she’s not the only one dancing around on the edge of a terrible idea.

When she gets back to the table, Zee’s downed the pink nightmare and is so deep in an argument with Price about god knows what that they barely notice her go. She grabs her bag and is out the door in less than five minutes.

* * *

 

To their credit, they actually do manage to behave like respectable adults for a solid thirty minutes or so, back on Beverly’s couch with Thai takeout in their hands. Bev chows down on an order of spring rolls over Freddie’s objection that the entire point was  _ not  _ to eat something fried, and Freddie’s papaya salad turns out to be so spicy that Beverly briefly considers crying even though she’s no spice wimp.

Rosie noses around them both, but ends up deeply disappointed in the lack of chicken on display. She gives up and falls asleep in her favorite cat bed, snoring in a way that Freddie finds hilarious. Bev tries to defend Rosie, but honestly, the reedy whistle of her feline snore is in fact deeply entertaining.

They talk about the food, and the awful pink shots that Freddie is forbidden from ever sending Bev’s way again, and the advertising war that Freddie has somehow gotten into with a rival journalist. Bev snickers at the idea of rival journalists, which somehow sounds very Pulitzer-and-Hearst and not something she thought really happened anymore. Freddie gets very impassioned on the subject. There’s a great deal of hand-waving and some impressively colorful language.

They don’t talk about Bev’s work, handshake deal or not. They don’t talk about why they’re back at Bev’s place with takeout, rather than eating at the Thai restaurant. Rosie’s overdue dinner had been a convenient excuse, but a flimsy one. 

All in all it’s a very civilized half hour, before Bev gets down to the very important question of finding out whether Freddie’s hidden any recording devices on her person. 

“I’ve heard,” she says as she’s licking at the salt of Freddie’s skin, “that they make very small recording devices these days. You could hide them pretty much anywhere.”

“Mm.”  Freddie’s gone a little boneless, but not so much that she can’t offer an assist with the whole bra-unhooking thing, which is always a little weird  for Bev, her fingers tripping over the backwards motions on someone else’s body. “You might be a little paranoid.”

“I prefer to call it  _ thorough _ .”

Bev proceeds to be very thorough, determining that Freddie isn’t hiding any tiny space-age wireless recording devices between the soft slopes of her breasts, or stuck to the warm skin of her sides, or anywhere on her back. Just to be sure, when she makes her way back up to kiss Freddie again, she keeps her hands busy exploring, touching and rubbing and seeking out any sensitive spot that might make Freddie sigh or moan or admit to being here for journalistic reasons rather than personal.

Let it never be said that Beverly Katz does not give her full attention to any task she sets her mind to. Grandma Katz would never have approved of anything less, although admittedly she probably hadn’t foreseen quite the uses to which her granddaughter would put that particular bit of work ethic one day.

It’s a little distracting, admittedly, that Freddie keeps tugging at Bev’s hair just hard enough to hurt in an interesting way, and that she twists and wriggles in a delightful but distracting fashion under Bev’s careful examination.

But not as distracting as all that. Bev is not to be deterred. 

Eventually she finds herself half-pinning Freddie, who’s panting and slightly wild-eyed and stronger than she looks, but not FBI-trained in holding suspects down without inflicting serious harm. A stray curl clings to Freddie’s forehead with sweat and Bev doesn’t stop to think about the dangerous feeling of tenderness it evokes, she just nuzzles it away since her hands are occupied, and kisses Freddie’s forehead, and whispers, “What do you want?  Tell me what you want, baby, I want to give it to you” and then she wants to swallow her own tongue because where did  _ that _ come from?

But Freddie’s too far gone to make fun of the pet name. She just tugs at her pinned wrist - not seriously, not enough to get away, just enough to feel held - and glares up at Bev. “I want you to stop fucking around and make me come,” she manages, tendons showing in the tense stretch of her neck. “And then I want to see you come at least twice. And then I’m going to pass out for a while. If that’s all right with you.”

It’s definitely all right with Bev.

Things get a little hazy for a while after that. Freddie seems to have decided payback is in order, and she spends a long, hazy stretch of time torturing Bev in a lot of extremely pleasant ways. At some point she pauses for a brief lecture on the current state of miniature recording devices and how Bev watches too many spy movies, and Bev seriously considers showing off how easily she could flip Freddie over and shut her up. In the end she settles for a  _ Lounds, shut the fuck up already, I’m dying here _ , and Freddie snickers but takes the hint, and returns her mouth to better uses until Bev shatters entirely.

They both opt for the “passing out for a while” plan, and when Bev swims up to the surface of her consciousness again, she finds herself wrapped around Freddie.  _ Always the big spoon, never the little one _ , she thinks with only a small sigh, and settles in a little more comfortably. Freddie’s still out like a light, and her hair is goddamn everywhere. Bev considers whether she needs a bigger bed if this is going to be a thing. Her bed is plenty big for two people and Rosie, but possibly not big enough for two people, Rosie, and Freddie Lounds’ hair.

Which is getting ahead of herself, really. Bev opts to blame that entirely on horrible pink shots and tiny evil journalists and exhaustion. There’s probably some rule about never making decisions within an hour after an orgasm, like how you’re not supposed to swim for half an hour after eating, or get into a relationship the first year you’re sober. If there’s not a rule, there should be; maybe she’ll invent it. Maybe she’ll name it in Freddie’s honor. 

She briefly considers waking Freddie up to tell her about this new rule she’s just invented, but she looks peaceful when she sleeps. And considerably less troublesome. There’s a small furrowed line between her eyes, as if she’s thinking hard even as she rests.  She doesn’t show any signs of waking up, or of giving Bev her arm back anytime soon.

There are worse places to be, with worse people, although Bev can just imagine the argument she’d get if she voiced that thought aloud at work. Which is a problem for Future Bev, who will be allowed to make decisions. Current Bev isn’t allowed to make decisions for at least another forty-five minutes. The Freddie Lounds Rule says so.

Instead she curls herself more comfortably around Freddie, allows herself one small, secret smile that she presses into the bare back of Freddie’s shoulder, and drifts away again into sleep.


End file.
